The purpose of the North American Climate Policy Forum is to provide a structured dialogue between senior policy officials from each country and leading experts in climate policy design, low carbon technology and innovation policy.

 

Building off of the insights shared at the Forum, this report reviews opportunities and challenges for climate change policy harmonization in North America. We first provide an overview of how existing regulatory approaches to climate change, as well as recently announced joint emissions reduction targets, lay the groundwork for this climate policy harmonization. We then discuss four issue areas that present potential opportunities and challenges for climate policy harmonization: alignment with trade policy, carbon pricing, clean innovation policy, and climate change adaptation policies.

 

For each area, we review insights raised during the Forum regarding the policy opportunities, challenges, and potential for cross-jurisdictional harmonization, occasionally expanding on these insights drawing on relevant literature. The report concludes with opportunities for future research that can further illuminate the issues raised at the conference and in the literature